Fresh alternatives in content management are presenting IT buyers with new options and new technology choices. In addition, content management vendors are targeting newer applications to small and mid-sized businesses, an area that, until recently, was largely overlooked.

It wasn’t that long ago that content management tended to focus on very high-end, specialized applications. Over the past five to seven years, however, content management has gained in importance for all organizations, with the digital universe as a whole growing at an exponential rate. In fact, according to a March 2008 IDC report entitled, “The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011,” the digital universe is expected to grow from 281 billion gigabytes in 2007 to nearly 1.8 zettabytes (1,800 exabytes) in 2011, representing a tenfold increase over the next five years. (See Fig. 1.)

As a result, “The need for content management has moved way down from high-end, specialized applications to basically controlling all the data that is in everybody’s day-to-day jobs,” notes Tracy Welsh, VP of business development for South River Technologies, a company specializing in document collaboration and secure file transfer.

The IDC report also disclosed that while approximately 70 percent of the digital universe is created by individuals, 85 percent of the security, privacy, reliability, and compliance issues become the responsibility of enterprises. (See Fig. 2.)

And this poses a challenge. A recent AIIM study of 528 end users found that 50 percent of respondents believe that the ability to find needed information quickly is much more difficult on their organizations’ internal websites, than it is on the websites established for consumers.

Another AIIM study that polled more than 200 IT business professionals revealed that businesses continue to struggle with managing “unstructured” information, including scanned images, Word files, spreadsheets, presentations, and e-mail. Indeed, 99 percent of respondents affirmed that unstructured information plays an important role in driving their business processes, yet most face serious challenges when and if unstructured information is not readily available as part of those processes.

These are serious problems that affect everyone, not just enterprises. There are difficult processes to go through to get information up and running on a website. Oftentimes, there’s little or no visibility into what kind of information is up on the site or what kind of brand tactics might be inappropriate. Navigation is an issue when it’s impossible to search and find things in a user-friendly way.

Add to that the fact that marketers face a need to launch truly integrated marketing campaigns with a website as their core, rather than relying on a more siloed approach such as e-mail, search engines, marketing, and so on, and you’ll see how overwhelming the problem is.

So what can an organization do with this massive amount of content? Enterprises have had to confront this to grow as large as they have. But small and mid-sized businesses need help just as much as their enterprise neighbors. In that light, basic content services, or slimmed-down versions of enterprise content management offerings, have really taken off in the last two to three years. “People just need an easy way to deal with all this stuff that comes at them all day long,” Welsh says.

Content Management and Open Source

Both pre-packaged and open source alternatives have made content management more feasible for some of these smaller businesses. The difference between the two approaches is that packaged products cannot respond as quickly to the needs of the market as open source products can.

“Any content management system in the market should give a company the wherewithal to federate out editorial and production work for its website,” says Joseph Bachana, president and founder of DPCI, a deliverer of integrated content management solutions and an implementer of the open source Drupal Content Management Solution. “Non-technical people should be able to eliminate old information.”

As technologies have matured and development costs have risen to one to five times their original packaged price, open source initiatives have also been maturing “to the point where they are becoming competitive with packaged products,” Bachana points out. “Companies that would never have looked at an open source solution are now saying they could spend money on these things. Major brands are actually looking at open source products that would never have considered that years ago.”

DPCI practices what it preaches. The company uses the Drupal Content Management Solution internally for all of its Web content management platform needs. “It has a pretty good framework, allowing you to add content to optimize search engine placement,” Bachana notes. “It has automated processes that allow you to not have to do a lot of cumbersome steps to get good placement on search engines. It’s a very modular product — it’s easy to put out a poll or survey, blog or forum. Because it’s one integrated platform, you don’t have to put together different pieces,” says Bachana.

Many other companies take different pieces of software from different vendors and categorize them together, but Drupal “allows you to build from the bottom up and roll out better customer experience kinds of utilities, even to the point where you can create platforms for people to collaborate internally.”

And here is something else DPCI does: it uses the Drupal application with its clientele. The product has an e-commerce component, a caching mechanism, a forum component, e-mail and newsletter capabilities, and more. DPCI integrates Drupal with different products based on customer needs. But, Bachana says, “it pretty much handles the majority of needs of most customers.”

David Crouch has taken a similar approach, recently starting his own content management consulting firm, ten24 Web Solutions. Seven to eight years ago, when working for a Web development company, he found he was receiving requests from clients wanting to manage their own content. At the time, there wasn’t much out there to meet that need, so he and his colleagues built their own solution.

Crouch wanted to recreate that online management system, so he left the Web development company to start ten24 Web Solutions. He chose to use an open source content management platform as its core. Crouch’s solution includes e-mail marketing, analytics, and sales force integration components.

“Open source in content management is a much more established, much more robust alternative to proprietary products out there,” Crouch says. He and his team examined a number of open source players, including Drupal, Mambo, and Joomla, before choosing Plone. “Plone was a dark horse,” he says, “We didn’t know a lot about them. There’s not as much press about them.”

But after evaluating the other open source prospects alongside of Plone, Crouch knew this was the right tool for him. Plone is folder-based, he says — very intuitive, with a simple process for editing and managing pages, documents, and images. Plus, it includes solid workflow, sharing, and secure content.

One area where Plone really differs from its open source competitors is in its coding language. While most are written in PHP — and, as a result, have a larger user base and are easier to learn — Plone is written in Python, a more structured language

Crouch’s target audience is small to mid-sized businesses with one to 70 million or so users, clients that are relying on an IT guy to do a website and are starting to look at generating content such as white papers and blogs, and pushing content through e-mail.

The technology is the easy part, Crouch says. Content is the hard part. “With small companies, [content] always is an issue. It’s always bigger than they think it’s going to be.”

Crouch cautions that cost savings in project development is not one of the benefits of open source. “Just because you’re using open source doesn’t mean the project’s going to be inexpensive,” he says. “In the long term, you’ll save in licenses and fees” by not being locked into a vendor.

Open Source Not for Everyone

Although open source might have some advantages over pre-packaged products for some companies, it’s not the big fix for everyone. One downside of the open source community is the lack of centralized modules and functionality so that everyone can participate in furthering those things. Not everyone who improves or changes modules and functions, for example, posts the updates to that particular open source community. “Everybody wants to have their own intellectual property and competitive edge,” explains DPCI’s Bachana.

Toward that end, a middle tier of commercial applications is arising that are more affordable and are maturing to a point where they might get closer to the specific requirements of a company, Bachana says.

One such company is South River Technologies (SRT), whose target audience ranges from organizations as large as the University of Portland, with 6,500 users, to small engineering companies with 25 users. The company’s “sweet spot,” SRT’s Welsh notes, is small to medium-sized businesses, along with larger departmental applications in bigger companies.

The rise of open source has not affected SRT’s business, according to Welsh. The big benefit with open source is its customizability, but that doesn’t affect SRT’s customer base. “I think our customers are really much more focused on, ‘I need something I can put in today and have running tomorrow or next week,’” she says. In many organizations, she continues, the IT staff is somewhat limited, and consequently tends to be less interested in getting an open source application and tweaking it.

SRT offers a product called GroupDrive, which ties into Active Directory but also allows users to map to any repository on their network. “Our philosophy is much more to leverage technologies a company already has in place. We’re fairly agnostic.”

Looming Large

Global companies that need central management for their global platforms might need a commercial application to meet their needs. Be that as it may, some higher-end players are losing market share to some of the middle-tier players and open source alternatives. As a result, they’re taking notice and coming up with their own offerings for small to mid-sized businesses.

Lyris is one such example. The software vendor targets its solutions for SMBs all the way up to large enterprises. Its latest offering, Lyris HQ, an integrated online marketing suite that includes a Web content management system (CMS), is targeted primarily to SMBs in a hosted environment.

Lyris got the vision to pull this together in 2006, according to Blaine Mathieu, the company’s chief marketing officer. “Over the last year and a half, we’ve been buying or building the assets to make it happen.”

What led to Lyris’s offering for the mid-market? Mathieu explains, “I’m a marketer who sells marketing tools. I have to eat my own dog food. I felt the real pain of dealing with disconnected tools, running siloed organizations. The value proposition of being able to offer an integrated approach to online marketing was very obvious.”

One significant piece of the puzzle for Lyris is the Hot Banana CMS the company gained in its acquisition of Hot Banana in 2006. In addition to that piece, the suite includes e-mail marketing, search engine marketing, Web analytics, asset management, and deliverability analytics components — basically the same things that ten24 offers, but in a different business model.

Lyris HQ is seat-based, or user-based. That means for the price of one seat, a user gains the full capability of the suite. And once users sign a contract with Lyris, they can be up and running within a couple of hours, Mathieu says.

Another example of a software vendor for enterprises that is reaching out to small and mid-sized businesses is EMC Corp. Along with Lyris, EMC has noted a growth of interest in content management from smaller organizations and toward different business models.

The company has a mid-market offering called ApplicationXtender that it gained in its acquisition of Legato. This particular product is aimed at imaging applications and document management.

Through its acquisition of Documentum, EMC gained eRoom.net, an electronic room that is basically a team workplace for people to go online and have a contextual area to share documents, discussions, version management, security control, and the like.

The company also recently released Documentum 6.5, which adds more Web 2.0 technologies and aims to take social networking metaphors, such as interacting with people and conceptual design, into the business. “If you could take those ideas [of social networking] and apply them toward business tools, business tools would be much better,” says Whitney Tidmarsh, VP of marketing for EMC’s content management and archiving business.

Open source alternatives have not affected EMC’s business, according to Tidmarsh. Yet, she adds, the rise of such tools does expand the scope of attention on the content management market as a whole and begs the question of which pricing models are best for content management offerings — subscription-based, hosted, or packaged products.

Advice for SMBs

Small and mid-sized companies pursuing content management solutions need to do their homework. With the myriad options out there, here is some advice to heed. First of all, be sure to identify the business problem you’re trying to solve.

“Forget the technology for a second,” encourages ten24’s Crouch. “What exactly do you need to do with your company — marketing, customer support, recruitment, what? What are your goals? What are your strategies to get there?” Deal with the business issues first, he says, then look at the technology.

SRT’s Welsh adds, “Really understand the difference between what’s a nice have and what’s a must have.”

DPCI’s Bachana advises looking at similar websites that you want to emulate. “Try to draw out some rough sketches of what outcomes [you] want on [your] website.”

Once you’ve determined the problem you’re trying to solve, then, and only then, look for a vendor who can help you solve that problem. It’s a good idea to ask for client references and to talk to clients. Lyris’s Mathieu suggests looking for search engine friendliness. “Make sure the company can also provide consulting and the services you need as you grow your content management.”

A key to keep in mind is understanding how you’re going to integrate your CMS into the rest of your online marketing ecosystem. Be sure you choose a vendor that meets the business model you’re interested in and that is dependable.

And the Future Is…

The future of the content management marketplace is rich. With the proliferation of the digital universe, adequate content management is sure to become more and more important. We can expect to see continued market consolidation and segmentation. “CMS on its own is no longer enough,” notes Lyris’s Mathieu. “CMS-only providers will expand their value proposition or go out of business. They all need to come together to create true marketing automation systems.”

Basic content services offerings will continue to gain traction. In fact, SRT reported that it is on pace to do 2½ times the volume next year that it did this year, Welsh says. “Basic content services are going to become almost somewhat commoditized.”

In addition, Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings will begin to segment out. EMC, for example, is working on ensuring that it can prepare for full SaaS. “We have all the pieces in place to make SaaS happen,” Tidmarsh acknowledges. “SOA plays a big part here to chunk functionality together to give the pieces what they need and only what they need.” That will continue to segment out.

Some of the higher-end applications will begin to focus on solving specific problems, such as engineering and healthcare services, as DPCI’s Bachana noted. “Content management will break up into a number of much narrower-focused types of applications moving forward, with basic content services being something that everyone just implements that will enable you to easily collaborate with people not only in the company, but outside as well,” predicts SRT’s Welsh.

Open source is here to stay, and it will continue to play a role in the development of software. But keep in mind that it is only a piece of the puzzle. Although three or four years ago we were led to believe that open source would replace the software industry as we knew it, “what we’ve really seen is it’s come to be another tool in the tool box that corporations can use to move them ahead,” Mathieu says.

The bottom line, Bachana says, is that content management systems really try to work from the bottom up, much as a single platform does. “Stick to the platform, make it integrated, and all the modules that sit on top of the platform should be communicating back down to the platform.”

Lana Gates is managing editor of Software Magazine. E-mail her at lgates@softwaremag.com.